Networking

Networking involves at least two devices capable of being networked with at least one usually being a computer. The devices can be separated by a few meters (e.g. via Bluetooth) or thousands of kilometers (e.g. via the Internet).

IT has gone through a significant evolution over the past decade. Virtualization has changed the entire face of the data center, the network edge has become predominantly wireless and consumer devices reign supreme. However, one of the few areas of IT that has yet to evolve is the corporate wide area network (WAN). Managing the WAN is something network managers have always struggled with because WAN speeds are typically an order of magnitude, or more, slower than local area networks (LANs).

In January 2015, Cisco commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment enterprises may realize by deploying Cisco TrustSec. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Cisco TrustSec on their organizations.
The Cisco TrustSec solution simplifies the provisioning and management of highly secure access to network services and applications. Unlike access control mechanisms that work on network topology, Cisco TrustSec policies use logical grouping. Highly secure access is consistently maintained even as resources are moved in mobile and virtualized networks.

As the corporate landscape becomes increasingly mobile, and workers collaborate across a growing range of devices, organizations are implementing an agile and secure unified communications infrastructure. Active deployment of UC technology solutions has been on the rise among enterprises; however, adoption among midsize businesses has been notably slower. Yet in seeking ways to do more with less, midsize organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud and converged networks to provide UC solutions.
In October 2013, Cisco commissioned Forrester Consulting to dive deeper into the current usage trends and perceptions of unified communications among midsize organizations (100 to 999 employees) across North America, Asia, and Europe.

You have three choices for using Cisco® Unified Communications and Collaboration applications: on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid of the two. The option that is best for your company depends on your IT skills, budget priorities, growth plans, and customization requirements.
This guide, intended for organizations with 100 to 1000 employees, will help you compare the options.

Midsize businesses have ever-greater choice in premises-based unified communications, with providers extending features and go-to-market channels while trying to maintain ease of use and consistency. Midmarket IT planners should evaluate UC providers' delivery capabilities, not just their solutions.

This white paper presents IDC’s analysis of the business value organizations are achieving by using Cisco UCS as a platform for SAP HANA and other SAP Business Suite applications. This analysis is based on IDC’s interviews with 12 Cisco UCS customers. These organizations are all relatively large organizations (1,500–85,000 employees), with an average of 25,383 employees. Interviewees represent a variety of industries: natural resources, agriculture, energy, government, automotive, retail, food and beverage, distribution, technology, healthcare, and IT. These organizations are based in the United States, EMEA, Mexico, and Brazil.

“Innovation” is an overused term. The smallest adjustments, the most trivial enhancements, and the least impactful improvements are often trumpeted as innovative. But every once in a while, something truly groundbreaking and transformative comes our way—disrupting longstanding assumptions and norms in the process. This edition of Unleashing IT showcases Cisco’s holistic approach to the future of networking: application Centric Infrastructure (aCI). Promoted by Cisco, Intel®, and ecosystem partners, aCI is a true innovation that changes the way technology is delivered in support of business priorities

Software Defined Networking For Dummies, Cisco Special Edition, shows you what SDN is, how it works, and how you can choose the right SDN solution. This book also helps you understand the terminology, jargon, and acronyms that are such a part of defining SDN.
Along the way, you’ll see some examples of the current state of the art in SDN technology and see how SDN can help your organization.

This document is intended to help network planners, engineers, and managers who are deploying Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches in a data center as replacements for Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series Switches.

The pace of change facing Cisco's IT department is accelerating as new applications, particularly from cloud and mobile environments, become key business enablers. Cisco's IT department, which is responsible for 4,067 production applications and inspecting 27TB of data daily, must be able to deploy such applications quickly, securely, and cost-effectively — and then make changes to them or remove them just as quickly and efficiently.

Built for continuous availability in mission-critical data center environments, Cisco NX-OS has set the standard for resiliency, extensibility, efficiency, and virtualization. Now it has added programmability and automation to that list, too.
For this episode of TechWiseTV, Robb Boyd talks to two foremost experts in this, the world's most deployed operating system in the data center. They discuss all the exciting changes Cisco has made to NX-OS and, more importantly, how organizations can take full advantage of this automation opportunity.
This is truly a deep dive into the full potential of all the components that compose Open NX-OS.

Industrial enterprises around the world are retooling their factories with advanced technologies to boost manufacturing flexibility and speed, achieving new levels of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), supply chain responsiveness, and customer satisfaction in the process. This renaissance reflects very real pressures industry players face today. For years, traditional factories have been operating at a disadvantage, impeded by production environments that are “disconnected”—at the very least strictly gated—to corporate business systems, to supply chains, and to customers and partners.
Managers of these traditional factories say the feeling is akin to flying blind. These are operations where plant floors, front offices, and suppliers operate in independent silos, where managers have only hazy visibility into downtime and quality problems, and where the root causes of inefficiencies are rarely understood or addressed.

IoT describes a system where items in the physical world, and sensors within or attached to these items, are connected to the Internet via wireless and wired Internet connections. These sensors can use various types of local area connections such as RFID, NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. Sensors can also have wide area connectivity such as GSM, GPRS, 3G, and LTE.

With 50 to 100 billion things expected to be connected to the Internet by 2020, we are now experiencing a major paradigm shift that is revolutionizing business. More and more of the objects we use every day—including those in our factories, utilities, and railroads—are used to capture and distribute information that is helping us know more and do more.
The TechWiseTV team and guest experts take an in-depth look at how industries like these are utilizing the data they are gathering from the factory floor all the way out to the field.
This exploration into how the Internet of Things actually works in the real world and what your organization must do to take full advantage of it is a great opportunity to understand the practical challenges and specific technology involved in bringing all this potential to life.

Gain Immediate Value from Your Connected Factory Architecture!
Imagine if you could reconfigure your production line in days instead of weeks. Or if you could cut long search times for parts in half using factory wireless across a connected factory architecture.
These are only a few of the reasons why leading manufacturers deploy Cisco’s Connected Factory Solution.
Now you can try out these new technologies and capabilities on a small scale, with low financial risk in your own plant with the Cisco Connected Factory Starter Kit. Create a living lab and test out one or more specific use cases. Use it as a demo to get buy in from stakeholders. Or get one production line up and running immediately and roll out a more comprehensive deployment later on.

This IDC study provides a competitive analysis of the enterprise mobility management (EMM) software market for 2014. In addition to a ranking of the top 15 vendors by revenue, it provides an overview of key market trends and vendors that helped shape the market landscape in 2014.

IT requires a solution that solves the challenge of securing proprietary applications and data in the cloud datacenter and is available only to users and devices that are delegated safe for access. VMware NSX solves this challenge through user-level micro-segmentation. The VMware NSX approach offers several differentiated advantages over traditional security approaches.

Amid unprecedented data growth, how are businesses optimizing their data environments to ensure data governance while creating analytic value? How do they ensure the delivery of trusted and governed data as they integrate data from a variety of sources?
If providing appropriately governed data across all your data sources is a concern, or if the delivery of consistent, accurate, and trusted analytic insights with the best blended data is important to you, then don’t miss “Delivering Governed Data For Analytics At Scale,” an August 2015 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Pentaho.

This report explains the benefits that Hadoop and Hadoop-based products can bring to organizations today, both for big data analytics and as complements to existing BI and data warehousing technologies based on TDWI research plus survey responses from 325 data management professionals across 13 industries. It also covers Hadoop best practices and provides an overview of tools and platforms that integrate with Hadoop.

Although the phrase “next-generation platforms and analytics” can evoke images of machine learning, big data, Hadoop, and the Internet of things, most organizations are somewhere in between the technology vision and today’s reality of BI and dashboards. Next-generation platforms and analytics often mean simply pushing past reports and dashboards to more advanced forms of analytics, such as predictive analytics. Next-generation analytics might move your organization from visualization to big data visualization; from slicing and dicing data to predictive analytics; or to using more than just structured data for analysis.

If you are working with massive amounts of data, one challenge
is how to display results of data exploration and analysis in a
way that is not overwhelming. You may need a new way to look
at the data – one that collapses and condenses the results in an
intuitive fashion but still displays graphs and charts that decision
makers are accustomed to seeing. And, in today’s on-the-go
society, you may also need to make the results available quickly via mobile devices, and provide users with the ability to easily explore data on their own in real time.
SAS® Visual Analytics is a data visualization and business
intelligence solution that uses intelligent autocharting to help
business analysts and nontechnical users visualize data. It
creates the best possible visual based on the data that is
selected. The visualizations make it easy to see patterns and
trends and identify opportunities for further analysis.